Romanticism, Economics and the Question of 'Culture' [Paperback]

The Romantic age in Britain formed one of the most celebrated--and heterogeneous--moments in literary history, but it also witnessed the rise of political economy as the pre-eminent nineteenth-century science of society.Romanticism, Economics and the Question of 'Culture'investigates this historical conjunction, and reassesses the idea that the Romantic defense of spiritual and humanistic culture developed as a reaction to the individualistic, philistine values of the dismal science.

Drawing on a wide range of source material, the book combines the methods of literary scholarship and intellectual history. It addresses the changing political identifications of familiar literary figures such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, but also illuminates the wider political and intellectual life of this period.

Romanticism, Economics and the Question of 'Culture'situates canonical Romantic writers within a nuanced, and highly detailed ideological context, while challenging our inherited understanding of the Romantic tradition itself as the social conscience of nineteenth-century capitalism.

Introduction,'The Condition of England'
1. 'A Deeper Nature': Malthus, Poetry and Political economy
2. Moral Culture and the March of Mind: Economics and Education in the Early Nineteenth Century
3. The Politics of Apostasy: Coleridge, Wordsworth and Lake School Literary Conservatism
4. Radicals, Reformers and Legislators of the World
5. Robert Southey and the Infections of Commerce
Conclusion,The Politics of Romanticism
Select Bibliography
Index

The depth of discussion of Wordsworth is characteristic of Connell's excellent book, which does not only examine the older generation of English Romantic poets; one of the most interesting chapters analyses the ambiguous relationship between the 'Hunt school' of younger radical writers...and the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and his followers. Conlc)